California Researchers? using that logic the more gas costs the more people would drive.
Yes, the researchers were from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology. They found that because people expect wines that cost more to be of higher quality, they trick themselves into believing the wines provide a more pleasurable experience than less expensive ones. Their study says that expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected.
While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain. I have certainly found anecdotal evidence of this at informal wine tasting parties where the brand of wine was kept secret. The expensive, highly-touted wines always lost out to the cheaper wines in blind taste tests.
I don't think the gas analogy holds true because everyone knows the price of gas is: (a) set by market forces; and/or (b) fixed by the oil companies; and has no perceived relationship to its quality or performance. Audio gear, on the other hand, has a strongly perceived relationship between price and performance. I think there is no question that a lot of gear, especially cables and tweaks, is marked way up above what it deserves and is considered to sound "better" simply because of the price it demands (Pear Cables, anyone?).
This is why the audio industry and particularly the major review magazines are so dead-set against blind testing. When you can't tell an audible difference between the $15,000 C.D. player and the $2,000 C.D. player in a blind test, you don't have much to write about in your reviews and you don't get much advertising revenue from the company trying to sell the expensive players. I experienced this myself recently when I did a blind A/B test between the Sanders Sound Preamp and the ARC Ref 3. I felt I was able to tell a difference between the two, and correctly picked which preamp I was listening to 75% of the time, but it was incredibly difficult and the differences were much smaller and much more subtle than I had led myself to believe. The price difference between the two products, on the other hand, is not so subtle. Were I a magazine reviewer writing an article, I don't think ARC would be entirely happy with my comparison of the two products.
